Rep. Jim Gerlach: Obama's constitutional crisis

The first time I recall hearing the term constitutional crisis was as a teenager in the early 1970s.

At that time, President Richard Nixon was dragging our nation through his presidential death spiral. Americans watched in anguish as the Watergate scandal unfolded, revealing a president who routinely used executive authority to settle scores with political foes and engaged in unlawful activities.

When Congress tried to investigate the Administration’s conduct and demand accountability, President Nixon constantly invoked “executive privilege” and other defenses to stymie legitimate congressional oversight.

The result was a historic battle between the executive and legislative branches over the limits of power – one which severely tested our Republic’s system of checks and balances.

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Regrettably, the current Administration has sought to expand the limits of executive power once again, reminding many of us of the trying days our Republic endured under President Nixon.

In his recent column “Law of Land Means Nothing to Obama”, Charles Krauthammer rightly points out a multitude of examples where the President and his Administration have unilaterally waived, avoided or ignored unambiguous federal laws under the guise of “executive authority” and in derogation of a president’s specific constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute all laws.

Mr. Krauthammer concluded: “At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.”

President Obama’s answer to Mr. Krauthammer’s rhetorical query seems to be, “I have the power and authority to ignore clear federal law and bypass Congress to change any laws I don’t personally agree with.”

While this is certainly not the law-making process we all learned in our high school civics class, it appears to be the Obama Doctrine.

One example came in 2012 when President Obama ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stop enforcing current immigration law and end the deportation of young people brought into the United States illegally by their parents.

Just a few weeks ago, the president used the Obama Doctrine to blunt the impact the very health-care law he worked so hard to enact in 2010. Even though the law clearly states the so-called employer mandate would go into effect on Oct. 1, the President effectively rewrote the law to give employers an additional year to comply.

The most recent example occurred when Attorney General Eric Holder issued a memo essentially wiping federal marijuana laws off the books. Holder’s memo directed U.S. Attorneys to halt enforcement of laws banning the possession and use of marijuana in states, such as Colorado and Washington, that have passed laws that conflict with federal marijuana statutes.

Holder’s actions run counter to the constitutional principle that federal law pre-empts state laws on the same subject.

The President and Attorney General Holder did not want to wait for Congress to debate whether the federal laws dealing with marijuana use should be amended or repealed. What the president and attorney general did was undeniably turn a blind eye to their constitutional duty to faithfully execute federal law.

Our Constitution was delicately crafted to maintain and promote the checks and balances between the policy desires and wishes of a chief executive and the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

Our Founders were clear that the power to legislate lies solely in the Congress (Art. 1, Section 1), that the President may recommend to it “such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient” (Art. 2, Section 3), and that otherwise the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Art. 2, Section 3).

So if our nation is now confronted with a chief executive who regularly legislates by executive order, regulation or memo rather than engaging and winning over the Congress to achieve policy goals, are we not in a time where the constitutional law-making process created by the Founders has been turned on its head for the sake of executive expediency?

And if that’s the case, what does this type of “post-Constitution” presidency mean for the future of our Republic?

In my view, “constitutional crisis” seems to be a fitting description of where we are once again -- 40 years after I first heard that term.

Congressman Jim Gerlach is a Republican who represents Pennsylvania’s 6th District, which includes parts of Berks, Chester, Lebanon and Montgomery counties. He is a member of the House Ways & Means Committee.